Many restaurants and other locations where food articles are “cooked to order” utilize frying devices for cooking various food articles, such as French fries. For example, in most restaurants, French fries are cooked after receiving an order from a customer or, in some cases, just prior to receiving an order from a customer. Such conventional frying devices usually have an “open pot” configuration, where a container (e.g., a vat) of oil is open at the top so that a cook can place a basket containing food articles into the oil to fry the food articles. Once the food articles are fried for a desired length of time, the cook can remove the basket of food articles from the oil and prepare the cooked food articles to be served to an ordering customer.
The high heat required to fry food articles using conventional open pot fryers, however, has several disadvantages. First, high cooking temperatures can cause the frying oil to chemically break down and cloud up, thereby reducing the length of time and fry cycles that the oil can be used to cook food articles. As a result, the amount of product that can be cooked with a quantity of oil is reduced. Furthermore, high temperature cooking of oils can also diminish the possibility that the used oil can be recycled for other uses, such as for biodiesel fuel.
High cooking temperatures can also cause food articles to undesirably darken due to the Maillard reaction, which involves reducing sugars and amino acids. In addition, because an open pot fryer is open at the top, the cook is exposed to potentially dangerous high temperature oils. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system that produces a more desirable fried product and which reduces the risk of potential danger to the cook.
Vacuum conditions can permit the frying process to be performed at lower oil temperatures. As a result, oil used in vacuum frying systems generally lasts longer than oil used at atmospheric frying. Various vacuum frying systems have been used to fry commercial food articles at manufacturing plants. Such conventional vacuum frying devices, however, are generally configured to vacuum fry a large quantity of food articles for packaging and shipment to other locations for distribution and sale. As a result, such systems are not conducive for use in a restaurant, where various food articles are cooked to order.
Accordingly, there is a need for a vacuum frying device that is configured for vacuum frying food articles for relatively immediate consumption by an ordering customer.